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Take it with a grain of salt, or many grains of sand, if you want, when the young volunteers say that every one of the 60 or 70 people helping to put on Wikipedia’s annual convention here (called Wikimania) is active on Facebook.Not one exception? No. The young women in head scarves who patiently explain what can or cannot be done on Friday, according to Islam? Absolutely.

Then there is the young man who is part of the Facebook group devoted to the TV show “Friends.” “Facebook for me is just a way to keep in touch with friends,” said Yehia Hassaan, 18, a medical student. “Some of my friends, they are addicts. Always updating their status, changing their photos.”

Ahmad Belal, a 23-year-old medical student who came from Cairo to attend the conference, is one of those particularly enthusiastic users with hundreds of friends.

“For Egyptians the visa procedure for any country is very difficult,” he said. “You need a visa to visit any country in the world. Facebook and Wikipedia connect us to the outside.”

In the spring, a protest against rising food prices and the government took root on Facebook, with a page that had more than 75,000 members. The Facebook movement overlapped with a textile workers strike, and the government response was swift and severe.

The main organizer was arrested, and according to The Washington Post, said he was stripped and beaten by the security services in Cairo. Another organizer, Israa Abdel Fattah, a 27-year-old human resources administrator with no political experience who helped administer the Facebook page, was also arrested. A Free Israa group quickly emerged - she was called the Facebook Girl - with, at one time, tens of thousands joining up.

The young people at Wikimania were not afraid to talk about those recent events. Some said they had feared that Facebook would be shut down, but Kareem Mohamed, 20, a student of engineering in Alexandria, stated matter-of-factly, “that is not possible.”

Perhaps it is this context that explains the enthusiasm for building a stronger Arabic Wikipedia among the young people here, and the evangelism about contributing articles in their native language.

Among the Arab attendees, who were not exclusively from the world of computer science - many are medical students, others in engineering and architecture - the woeful shape of the Arabic Wikipedia has been the cause of chagrin. It has fewer than 65,000 articles, and ranks 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial tongue Esperanto.

Among the problems, less than 10 percent of the 80 million Egyptians are thought to have Internet access. And those with access tend to know English and prefer to communicate that way.

Elsewhere, writing articles for Wikipedia can appear to be a quirky obsession or mere hobby - other Wikipedia conferences have had a bit of a Star-Trek-convention feel to them. In Egypt, writing for Wikipedia is something more like a national priority.

“It is more important to spread free knowledge here,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, 22, who was born and raised in Alexandria, and just completed a degree in architecture. He said one of his fellow organizers had made a good point: “The gap between the Arab world and the Western world is not about money or politics. It is about knowledge. There are many examples of Egyptians who travel to Europe or the U.S. and become successful. If people had access to the same knowledge …, ” he said, trailing off.

Ahmed Tantawy, the technical director of IBM in the Middle East, spoke in the convention center of the new Alexandria Library and said, “Arabic content today is nothing,” holding his fingers close together. “Do kids chat with each other in English or Arabic? Most likely Arabic, I think.”

Into that vacuum enters Wikipedia. Ismail Serageldin, the director of the library, which is built on the site of the ancient treasury of manuscripts, said that Wikipedia could make up for the absence of a reliable, regularly updated encyclopedia, along the lines of Brittannica. “When intellectuals got around to transforming our country, in the 19th century, they were tackling other issues,” he said.

Material on Wikipedia is something that may be quickly ignored in the West, he said, but in Egypt, “it brings knowledge to the poor.”

“We have a generation gap that is huge,” Serageldin said. “Scholars in Egypt don’t use computers, and the younger people are very Internet savvy. We need to get young people involved.”

Nahla Ghoneim, a 23-year-old computer engineer at IT Works, said at the conference that young people in Egypt need to get involved in information technology “not just as consumers.”

“That is one of the problems here in Egypt,” she said. “We are consumers instead of contributors to technology. Wikipedia is a first step to getting involved.”

source: International Herald Tribune

The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news.

In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because they sell for a low price that could threaten the PC makers’ already thin profit margins.

The new devices, often called netbooks, have scant built-in memory and are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail accounts. The companies that pioneered the category, like Asus and Everex, both of Taiwan, are small, and so is the price. Some sell for as little as $300.

Despite their wariness of these slim machines, Dell and Acer, two of the biggest PC manufacturers, are not about to let the upstarts have this market to themselves. Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, recently sidled into the market with a hybrid of a notebook and netbook that it calls the Mini-Note.

Several makers are taking the low-powered PCs one step further. In the coming months, they are expected to introduce “net-tops,” low-cost versions of desktop computers intended for Internet access. A Silicon Valley start-up called CherryPal says it will challenge the idea that high-powered machines are required to allow basic computing functions in the Internet age. It is bringing out a $300 desktop PC that is the size of a paperback and uses 2 watts of power, compared with the 100 watts of some desktops.

It wants to take advantage of “cloud computing,” in which data is managed and stored in distant servers, not on the actual machine.

Industry analysts say that the emergence of this new class of low-cost, cloud-centric machines could threaten titans like Microsoft, Intel, HP and Dell, because they have built their companies on the notion that consumers want more power and functions built into their next computer.

Some of the big computer companies put a positive spin on the low-cost machines, saying they welcome new categories. But they would just as soon this niche did not take off, given the relatively low profit margins.

“When I talk to PC vendors, the No. 1 question I get is, how do I compete with these netbooks when what we really want to do is sell PCs that cost a lot more money,” said J.P. Gownder, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Even as some PC vendors are jumping into the fray, others say they are resisting. Fujitsu, one of the world’s top 10 personal computer makers, said that it believes the low-cost netbook trend is a dangerous one for the bottom line.

“We’re sitting on the sidelines because even if this category takes off, and we get our piece of the pie, it doesn’t add up,” said Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product management for Fujitsu. “It’s a product that essentially has no margin.”

Stan Glasgow, chief executive of Sony Electronics, said, “We are not looking at competing with Asus.” But he said the company was investigating what consumers wanted in a second PC.

It is a market that caught the major computer companies - both hardware and software - by surprise after Asus brought out the $300 Eee PC. The company thought it would be used primarily in education, or as a starter laptop for adolescents, but the interest has turned out to be broader.

With an emphasis on Internet-based applications like Google Docs, the Linux-based Eee PC sold out its 350,000 global inventory. It has been in short supply ever since, said Jackie Hsu, president of the American division of Asus. Everex has sold around 20,000 of its CloudBook, which sells for about $350.

The sales are a veritable drop in the bucket compared with the 271 million desktop and laptop PCs shipped globally last year.

But IDC, a research firm, predicts that the category could grow from fewer than 500,000 in 2007 to nine million in 2012 as the market for second computers expands in developed economies.

Intel, meanwhile, is projecting that by 2011, the market for the netbooks will be 40 million units a year, which is why it is jumping in with low-powered chips for netbooks and  net-tops.

Intel’s new Atom chip is competing against upstarts including Via, a Taiwanese company that has a chip called the C7. The C7 is showing up in netbooks and is being used in the Everex models and in HP’s $500 Mini-Note.

William Calder, an Intel spokesman, said that the cost of the Atom for PC makers was around $44, compared with $100 for a state-of-the-art chip. Intel executives think the market for low-cost PCs is too big to pass up, he said, though it raised a potential threat to more powerful and more profitable computing lines.

source: International Herald Tribune